Man, what a stressful freakin' week. So, last Sunday evening (the 18th), my fiance and I took our dog out to the park to run around. Everything was perfectly normal until all of a sudden Waffle (our dog) just stopped running up to us. We thought he was just tired, but within ~10 minutes, he could barely walk. We checked his gums which were starting to turn blue. We knew something was really wrong so we rushed him to the UW-vet clinic at ~8pm. The internist was on call and she took Waffle to the back, and said she'd run a bunch of tests and call when/if she figured out what happened. ~1 hour later we got the call that they found a HUGE growth on his spleen which had ruptured while he was playing. The rupture caused him to bleed internally and he was dying pretty fast. We ended up having the surgery to remove the growth (when I say huge I mean huge, it was almost 4 inches across and Waffle only weights ~40lbs.). The surgeon told us not only had he lost between 1/2 and 3/4 of his total blood volume, he had to remove 2 lymph nodes in addition to his spleen because they were "grossly abnormal". The surgeon (Dr. Tuttle...awesome guy) said his best guess was that Waffle had cancer, but we couldn't know until the pathology came back which takes almost a week...

After 3 days in the hospital, and ~$5K (which is approx. 25% of my YEARLY income), Waffle was ready to come home. He's been slowly recovering and getting a little spunkier every day. His bruising is almost completely gone and you can only really tell he had surgery from the 30 or so staples in his belly.

Anyway, we got the call on the pathology today. IT WAS BENIGN!!!!! Despite all the odds that he's even alive after loosing almost all his blood, he doesn't have cancer! My fiance and I are so freakin' ecstatic, I just had to share!

I'm sure a lot of you have dogs, so you probably know how tough they are. I'm just so happily surprised, we we're both expecting the worst. I just can't say enough good things about the UW vet clinic for all their expertise. And I can't believe how much I love this damn dog. I didn't even want to get a dog 2 years ago, now I could not imagine a day without him running around and trying to make us happy.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.
~Horace Walpole